I think it's only applicable if you have the Facebook app on an Android phone, but I don't know where in the records it is.

i have to say this really annoyed me being pestered by them to switch over to their messenger. Also, I am not as learned as you and others here regarding privacy and who out there can get to what. I know you're very cautious as are others. I have not given it much of a thought with the rationale of why would any right thinking person/persons give two shits about my info, and anyway I keep very little on line. No finances or bill payments, no internet purchases. I go in search of my current event news. I can't think of anything they'd have of mine worth giving away.Which brings me back around to my musing, Facebook has all this personal info they're GIVING out, yet when I forgot my password a few years back there was virtually no way of recovering it and getting back in to it. And believe me I tried. Anyways, you seem so smart about this stuff. You really seem to know the law and it makes me wonder just how in the dark I really am.

__________________
When God gives you AIDS, make lemonaids. --Sarah Silverman

The information you give them is just the tip of the iceberg, and as far as that stuff goes, it doesn't really bother me personally that they're using voluntarily provided information to make ad profiles mostly. But they're also doing a lot more than that, using third party data and predictive modeling to do some pretty manipulative stuff that really goes beyond normal advertising. The one example that's getting tossed around a lot is that they have models for things like "People who are likely to support authoritarianism in response to fear," so political advertisers could be targeting those people with things designed to make them fearful to manipulate them politically. And because they're microtargeted only to those audiences, people who are less receptive to that message don't even see them, so they go unchallenged.

And if you don't care about that specific implementation, replace it with something from another perspective, like running ads saying that various policies and candidates are associated with white supremacist groups or that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, and those claims going unchallenged just because nobody knows they're there to challenge.

Even if you never paid bills or anything online, it's pretty well established that they're also getting information on people from data brokers, which includes lots of offline data. They're not forthcoming about it at all, but this could and probably does include your credit profiles like from Equifax, purchase histories from store loyalty cards, and things like that.

They also get information you didn't provide to them from people you know who let them run contact scrapers. So look on your phone and find the different apps that have access to your contacts. All of those apps are downloading complete copies of everything in your contact list, including other people's alternate numbers, emails, physical addresses, sometimes pictures, and anything else you have in there. And they use that information to tie together information those people haven't given them, and to create approximations of real life social networks. There's been some really creepy stories about this, including things like a therapist whose patients started getting recommended as "people you may know" to each other, and some guy having his biological child, whom he'd never met, recommended. They're probably also using location data for these things, too, making connections between people who frequent the same locations and whether it's at the same time, and their face recognition tech can identify people who appear in photos, including people in the background.

That also creates this context collapse phenomenon, which is a big deal for some people, including me. So you can't have separate social circles anymore, like "people from work" and "friends from the death metal scene." A lot of people, including sex workers, are at serious risk from that sort of thing. Others, like me, just really really don't like it and don't think it's some random company's place to do that to me. If I wanted every plumber and Comcast tech and coworker and employer or whatever to know all about my personal life, I'd tell them.

But some of the scariest, and potentially most damaging stuff comes from predictive models. They have these machine learning systems that observe and pick up clues from people's behaviors that let them predict or extrapolate a lot of unrelated things, including medical conditions. So one example I saw recently was that they can predict when a bipolar person is about to enter a manic phase, and they could advertise things like cheap tickets to Las Vegas to them. And there are already things like lists of rape victims and people with dementia available from data brokers, and pretty much anyone can buy them.

And that's the thing that I always think of when people say that they don't have anything to hide because they haven't done anything wrong. Violent crime victims and people with serious illnesses haven't done anything wrong, either, but there are predators out there who are already buying lists of those people and targeting them because of those things. And any one of us could end up in one of groups eventually, and find out too late that maybe it wasn't a great idea to have all that information out there. I mean, old people get targeted with all kinds of frauds and scams and things based just on the fact that they're more likely to suffer from dementia. I can tell you first hand that, if some data miner decides that your phone number belongs to someone in their 80s or 90s, you'll get an avalanche of calls from con artists. I used to deliver Meals on Wheels mostly to old people living in poverty in a seedy urban trailer park and residential motels in a high crime area, and almost every single one of my clients was there because they'd been scammed out of whatever money they had, and they were all still being targeted. Those who still had phones would get constant phone calls from people trying to trick them out of whatever little social security payments they had coming. Those with TVs would get targeted with exploitative TV commercials. And scummy 'sales' guys came to their doors even if they didn't have a phone or TV. They never had enough food, their utilities would get turned off a lot, and people just sort of disappeared all the time, especially the ones in the motels. And this was a long, long time ago. The con artists' tactics have gotten much better since then, and they're still improving. They're able to target vulnerable people much more precisely now so they're not wasting their time on those who still have all their faculties, or who have others watching out for them.

And, of course, I have never given Facebook any information about me. I've never had an account, I've never trusted them, and I don't want anything to do with them. But they've got information about me anyway. Some from people I know who've run contact scrapers, some probably from other companies. But I'm not allowed to have access to any of it. I don't know what it all consists of, what assumptions they've made, how extensive it is, or what they're doing with it, and they've recently made it very clear that they don't intend to let me see it. They've claimed they need it for 'security purposes,' and the media is just reporting that at face value without even asking what that means. It makes no sense. Whose security? How?

They're a huge, wealthy company. They're not compiling huge dossiers on people out of idle curiosity. They have business reasons for doing it, and they're not saying what those business reasons are precisely.

And let's all keep it right in the top of our minds that they were trying to stick their tentacles into our medical records without our consent.

It's not just Facebook. It's also Google and the credit reporting agencies and data brokers like Axciom and others. It's a huge industry, and they're all really secretive about it, which is ironic to say the least.

And just think about all the longstanding social conventions and rules that are now being routinely violated. They've done away with the concept of "polite company," they've normalized gossip, and people are all so complicit that they've gotten super-defensive about it and decided that people who don't want to share every aspect and intimate detail of their life with random strangers are somehow stupid and/or crazy. And that is the opposite of true. This is a huge problem and a huge societal shift, and the vast majority of it has happened behind the scenes, with no public discussion or even public knowledge.

In short, they've turned Gladys Kravitz into some kind of super-powerful, all knowing robot and people are all like, "Okay."

Delete Facebook and Google, for a start. Not your accounts. The whole things. rm -rf Sue the credit reporting agencies for all the blatant, knowing and willing libel resulting in clear, provable monetary damages every day. (I literally don't understand how this has not already happened.)

Really, though, the US needs to pass strict privacy rules. Not just the super-narrow ones being proposed right now, but serious ones that make your personal information--all of it--your property, and that makes it illegal under threat of serious toothy punishment to share it without consent except in a few very narrow capacities, mostly for the press and law enforcement. The GDPR is much better than the US laws being proposed so far, but I don't know enough about it to know for sure.

But everyone has to care what's happening in the US, because it's mostly US companies having the biggest influence.

Alternately, make the information they've already collected a hot potato by criminalizing using it for anything and penalizing anyone caught trying to and providing victims of that a private right of action, and at the same time, make it unprofitable to covertly compile that information in the future. As long as there are only scattershot regulations, they're going to keep doing what they want and every now and again pay a fine for it. They get in trouble in Europe a lot already, which is where most of the information about their shadow profiles comes from. If, however, it were illegal and regularly penalized in the US AND Europe, they'd start complying.

So I dunno. I do think it's pretty unlikely, especially at this point, that any serious regulations would be passed, but I don't know that either. At least the media is finally paying some attention to it right now.

The more investigating I am doing the more sick I feel to my stomach. As an aside thought, I asked them about a year ago to delete my account. They tried to talk me out of it by saying ‘but so-and-so’ would miss you are you SURE? I said yes. They said it would take a few weeks. It never happened.

__________________
When God gives you AIDS, make lemonaids. --Sarah Silverman

Does anyone know where I can get the reports Facebook just gave congress answering the questions from the hearings? There are plenty of articles saying they've been delivered, but I want to see the actual verbatim answers. I think they got the Senate one a few days ago and the Congress one like Friday or something.

Does anyone know where I can get the reports Facebook just gave congress answering the questions from the hearings? There are plenty of articles saying they've been delivered, but I want to see the actual verbatim answers. I think they got the Senate one a few days ago and the Congress one like Friday or something.